The Honey Perigee
by Atroll Mohtar
Summary: A chapter from the version of Amal El-Mohtar's THE HONEY MONTH that might exist on Alternia.


NIGHT 1: Mind Honey

Color: A pale yellow when viewed in direct light, like the eyes of a dead body. But held up before the screen of my computer, the light shining through catches the crystal edges blue and red.

Smell: Foreign, yet familiar, like the smell your own respiteblock on returning from a long absence. The smell of distance, of travel.

Taste: There are those who say not to eat the mind honey, but where would this project be then? It's a waxy taste, a substance not for pleasure but for work. I reach for my glass to wash the taste from my tongue, and the glass meets my hand halfway.

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There was a girl whose lusus was a number. It was a fearsomely large number, one of the biggest and most imposing, nearly too great in magnitude for the mind to hold. But it was a rational number, and it chose the girl after she navigated her trials with wit and efficiency. It took the girl to the surface, and taught her and protected her.

The girl learned much from her lusus. When it was time for the girl to build her hive, she had the carpenter droids work to the golden ratio. When she played games, she explored minimax solutions. She saw the trees, the shore, the twisting of her own horns as beautiful in their fractal complexity. And when one of her blueblooded peers killed a lowblood in sport, her awareness of economies of scale made it seem an ugly waste.

One night, in her explorations, the girl came upon young troll who had no lusus. Fresh from the cocoon, he had failed a trial and yet survived his failure, and would thus die abandoned and alone. No lusus would claim such a wriggler. Yet might not he have some valuable skills? Might not the work of his hands yet improve the efficiency of all? The girl was moved by the young troll's plight. As there was no custodian who would claim him naturally, she chose to make one. She summoned her lusus. When the great number arrived, she factored it. She split her lusus in two and tasked the larger portion with the pupa's care.

Once started down this path, there was no turning back. Before much time had passed, the girl discovered another abandoned wriggler. Bound by her own prior reasoning, she factored her lusus again. And then again. And again. There was no shortage of weak young trolls. But with each factoring, the resultant pieces of her lusus were smaller, less able to protect themselves or the trolls she had placed in their care. Whenever the pieces got too small, she converted her lusus's base to make them appear larger. She tumbled down through hexadecimal and duodecimal, octal and quinary. Eventually she reached binary. The pieces of her lusus were long strings of 1s and 0s, as stretched out as she could make them. But still the little wrigglers came.

The girl's lusus was astronomical, but not infinite. It was a tiny thing with emerald green blood that the girl was trying to save the night she reached its limit. She summoned her lusus, but there was no portion of it that was not already prime. It had been reduced entirely to its constituent parts, each part already tasked as custodian over a child. The girl cried at the brute futility of it, then dried her tears. _If they cannot be saved_ she decided _they must be remembered._

The girl gathered her lusus together, every prime factor of it, stretched in a long tangle of numerals. Starting with the greatest factor, she deconstructed it. She peeled the very digits from one another, separating 0s from 1s, truncating and bifurcating. When she was done, it was a lusus no more, but small purple things, blinking in their confusion, knowing nothing save that they were. They bee. She placed the wiggler before the bees and said, _Remember every 1 of them. Let 0 be forgotten._

The bees swarmed. But they did not swarm the little one. To the girl's surprise, they swarmed her. Then they flew away. They built a hive, a home of their own. They fed from flowers in forests and lawnrings. And under the light of the moons they produced their first drop of honey, not sweet at all, but sincere. A taste of all that the girl had been


End file.
